All Games

Word & category game

Sixteen everyday items are on the board, and they hide four groups of four. The trick is that most items look like they fit several groups at once, so the puzzle is working out which connection the board actually intends. You get four mistakes and two hints, and the four groups are ranked from straightforward to genuinely sneaky. A new board appears every day, drawn from practical, real-world knowledge — tools, cooking, plants, trades — so solving one usually teaches you something.

How to play 4 of a Kind →

Speedrun

The classic 15-puzzle, rebuilt in brushed silver: fifteen numbered plaques in a four-by-four tray with one empty socket. Slide them until they read 1 to 15 with the gap last. Every board you're dealt is checked to be solvable before it's handed to you, so no shuffle is ever a dead end — if you're stuck, it's the method, not the deal. Your moves, your clock and your best time are kept on your device, and most of the game is quietly trying to beat the run before.

How to play Fifteen →

One-button

A one-button flying game. Each tap is a single flap of thrust; the rest of the time you are falling, and the whole game is spending those flaps well as banks of cloud drift past. Every gap is guaranteed reachable from the one before it, so a run that ends is a run you can learn from rather than one the game stole from you. It gets harder honestly — the safe corridor narrows, the cloud thickens, the world speeds up — and the sky keeps opening the higher you climb.

How to play Flyer →

Classic, with rigs to unlock

Snake played straight — eat, grow by one, don't fold yourself in half. Keep playing and you unlock rigs to drive instead of the plain green homage: a Steam Train, a Semi Truck, a Wagon Train, each pickup hitching on another car, trailer or wagon. There are two ways to play it: Drive, where the rig never stops and you only steer, and Pull, where it moves only while you're hauling it and standing still costs you nothing. On a phone you can put a finger on the board in Pull mode and drag the whole thing around behind you.

How to play Snake →

Single player

The sliding-number puzzle, done to the original rules. Swipe and the whole four-by-four board moves at once; two equal tiles that collide merge into one worth double, and every move that changes anything drops a fresh tile into a free cell. Reaching 2048 is the stated goal and the game tells you when you get there, but you're free to carry on — the run only really ends when the board is full and nothing on it matches. The board you're halfway through survives a refresh, and there are 24 levels of undo for the move you wish you hadn't made.

How to play 2048 →

Two players or vs computer

Three in a row, done straight. Play a friend on the same device, or the computer at one of three settings: Easy makes real mistakes, Medium is a genuine challenge, and Impossible plays perfectly and never loses — against that one a draw is the win. You pick your mark and who opens, and the running tally of wins, losses and draws is kept for you. It is a short game with a genuinely useful idea buried in it: some games are solved, and knowing which ones changes how you play them.

How to play Tic Tac Toe →

Two players or vs computer

Chess with the whole rule book in it — castling that won't let you pass through check, en passant only on the move it's allowed, stalemate told apart from checkmate, threefold repetition and the fifty-move rule. Play a friend on one device or the computer at one of three settings, where the difference between them isn't a dice roll: the easiest one genuinely doesn't look past the first capture, so it hangs pieces the way a beginner does. There's a clock if you want one, and a take-back that makes the hardest setting a teacher rather than a wall.

How to play Chess →

Two players or vs computer

Table tennis played up and down the screen rather than across it, so a phone gives the rally its whole long axis and two people can sit at either end of one device. Where the ball meets your bat sets the angle it leaves at — flat in the middle, nearly sideways off the very edge — and that one fact is the entire game. Play to 5, 11 or 21, win by two, and pick from four looks that change the picture and nothing else.

How to play Ping Pong →

Two players or vs computer

Eight-ball pool on a proper cloth table, with the physics done in real table units — a nine-foot bed measured in inches, so a hard break is a genuine nineteen miles an hour rather than a number that only means something at one screen size. The first ball you pot after the break takes you solids or stripes; clear your set and the black wins it, unless you reach it early or foul on it, in which case it loses it. Drag on the cloth to aim and the line shows where the cue ball makes contact and where the object ball goes, then pull the rail back and let go. Three other games share the table: 9-ball, bumper pool on a rectangular or octagonal bed, and a practice table with no rules at all.

How to play 8 Ball →

Two players or vs computer

Draw a line between two dots; close the fourth side of a square and it's yours, and you go again. Those two sentences hide a real strategy game about chains and counting, and the moment it clicks is when you work out that taking every box you're offered is how you lose. Three grid sizes and three opponents, the hardest of which plays the all-but-two sacrifice and solves the endgame exactly rather than guessing at it.

How to play Dots and Boxes →

One or two players

The classic done straight: a hidden word, one letter at a time, six wrong guesses before the drawing finishes without you. The category is always on screen, because in hangman the category is the fairness dial — it gives you somewhere to start without handing you the answer. Ten themed sets and over a thousand words, all written for this game. Beyond the everyday round there's a Daily word — one a day, the same one for every player, on a cycle that runs years before it repeats — and a 2 Player mode where one of you types a word into a masked field, adds a hint if you're feeling generous, and hands the phone over.

How to play Hangman →

One player

A one-tap endless climb up a shaft with no top. The ninja is always clinging to a wall and always sliding down it, so height is something you are continuously losing and the only way up is to let go. Tap and it kicks off, arcs across, and sticks the other wall about ten metres higher — you never pick the wall, only the moment, which is what makes one button enough. Tap again in mid-air for a second kick, one per jump, to clear something that was in the way. The shaft narrows as you climb and the spikes, saws and blocks stop sitting still. Pick a ninja and Painted or hand-inked Vector art; both play the identical climb.

How to play Ninja Jump →

One player

Uncover the whole grid without opening a mine. Every cell you clear tells you how many of its eight neighbours are live, a cell with none opens its entire neighbourhood at once, and from there the board is a chain of small deductions rather than a run of guesses. The first tap is always safe — the mines are not dealt until after it, and then they are dealt around it — and a number whose flags are all placed can be tapped to clear everything else it touches, which is where the speed lives. Hold a cell to flag it, or flip the whole board to flag mode from the top bar. Three boards: 9×9, 16×16, and the full 480-cell expert grid turned on its side so it fits a phone whole, each keeping its own best time.

How to play Minesweeper →

Two players or vs computer

The four-in-a-row game, on a seven-by-six board. Drop a disc down a column and it falls to the lowest free space; line four up — across, down, or on either diagonal — before the other side does. That one constraint is what makes it a real game rather than tic-tac-toe on a bigger grid: you cannot put a disc where you want it, only where the board lets it go, and every disc you drop builds a step for your opponent to stand on. Each column is one full-height button, so your thumb aims at something six times taller than the disc it drops. Play a friend on the same device, or a computer at three levels — the easiest will hand you the square above its own disc, the hardest searches as deep as its time allows and will not.

How to play Four in a Row →

One or two players

Eighteen hand-built holes seen from above, front nine and back, par 56. Press anywhere on the course and pull back — the further you drag, the harder the putt — then let go and watch it run. Every hole is made of the same five things, so reading one teaches you all eighteen: rails you come off slower and at the angle you went in, blocks standing out in the felt, sand that takes no stroke but ends your shot where it lies, water that costs one and puts the ball back where you played from, and slopes that push the ball the whole time it is moving. The aim line previews one bounce only — two would be a solver, and reading the second bank is most of the game. A hole nobody can finish is picked up at eight. Play the round on your own against par, with your best round kept on the device, or hand the phone back and forth and settle it over eighteen holes, lowest total wins.

How to play Mini Golf →

One or two players

The flip-and-match game. A table of cards face down, every symbol on exactly two of them; turn two a turn, and a match stays up while a miss goes back the way it was — except now you know what was there and where. That is the whole game, and there is nothing in it to be good at except attention. Three board sizes up to thirty cards, and the sixteen symbols are drawn by the page itself in an expedition set, picked fresh every deal, so two boards of one size are never the same pictures rearranged. On your own a run is judged on moves before the clock, deliberately: the move count is the part that was skill. Two players pass one device around and a match earns another go — which is where the tension of that mode lives, because somebody who remembers well does not take one pair, they take four.

How to play Pairs →

One player

An endless crossing game seen from above. A jackrabbit, a wagon road with traffic on it, a river carrying logs, a level crossing with a train due — and exactly one direction that counts. Tap to hop forward and swipe to go sideways, or play it on the arrow keys. A wagon or a train ends the run, whether you hopped into it or it arrived while you stood there. Water is not ground: land on a log or you drown, and the log then carries you downstream, so a river is two problems — getting on, and getting off before the current runs you out of the world. What stops it being a queue is the dust: a few seconds in, a wall of it starts moving up the trail behind you and never stops, so standing still is its own decision. Distance is the score and it pays coins unevenly — rows deep into a long run are worth far more than the first few — which buys into ten hoppers, each held by both a price and a best run long enough to have earned it. One of them cannot be bought at all.

How to play Hoppy Trails →